Reading has become a bit of a lost art. This is most true in storytelling and other written texts that are created by authors who want to evoke emotion in readers. Because other media (e.g. videos, apps, digital games, augmented or virtual environments) engage more senses, they do a much better job of drawing emotional value out of people. Written pages of printed or digital words can't compare. Especially hard are long passages of text that are simply blocks of words on a page, page after page. These are often hard to follow, easy for a reader to lose his or her place or interest over time, and unstimulating as a multi-sensory experience.
Animated text and merging media with text on a digital display can be used to: segment written text to make it easier to read, create emphasis on written words, and provide a richer, more emotional, reading experience. However, no tools or software today allow written authors to create such animated, media-rich texts without significant coding and development resources.
Current methods and software that mimic or facilitate one's reading experience through the use of animated text include dynamic flashing of one word at a time. Flashing one word at a time with only one word showing on the screen at all time has been shown to be associated with improving the speed of one's reading. However, flashing one word at a time does not provide the user or author with an option to also allow for a natural reading experience, one in which the eyes move from one side of the screen/book/page to the other. Therefore, flashing one word after another at the same location does not facilitate a natural and comfortable reading experience for those not looking to increase their reading speed. Furthermore, other forms of animated text are used as graphical and visually pleasing enhancements that are usually created to serve as a title or banner.
Other methods allows the adjustment of more than one word being flashed at a time contemplated for improving reading speeds or to enable oneself to see the current location within a document by stopping the flashing of words and presenting the text in normal multi-line fashion with the current word highlighted.
However, currently, there is no simple way to create a real-time playback display of passages of text, wherein the text would animate in (and out) on a display in a way that is easily customizable to execute one word, a couple of words, sentences, or even paragraphs to animate at a time. Additionally, there is no easy customizable way of animating words at a cadence consistent with an author's intentions, or to create a more natural reading experience, such as creating pauses for standard text-based characters such as line breaks, tabs, and punctuation.
Further, there is no simple way for a user to customize the execution of certain words to animate, to execute audio or video to play in the background when desired, and to execute other animating features simply by pasting the passage of text into an input textbox and to mark particular words or phrases such that desired animating features associated with the appearance of that word or phrase appear on the display. Furthermore, there is no simple way for animating the words onto a screen based on an inputted audio file wherein the words would appear at the same speed at which the words were spoken in the audio file.
Given that the standard HTML elements that are used to code websites in browsers are the lowest-level components of a webpage that can be styled, they are also the lowest-level components that can be animated. And while text does not constitute as an element in and of itself, a block of text may be designated as a text node but is an unstylable, lower-level component that must be contained by an element. However, the browser does not subdivide text nodes into grammatical components, such that there is no way to access individual letters, words, or sentences. In general, exploding a body of text into character elements and animating them manually is a tedious process.
Consequently, to animate text on a letter, word, or sentence basis using HTML, you have to break each text node into separate text nodes, and then wrap each of these in a new element and then they can be animated. However, based on the prior art, that requires manually wrapping the text into elements, which is tedious and inefficient. Therefore, it actually has been considered widely as bad practice, given that the web browser using HTML code is a medium that prioritizes function over form, and text animation is largely about form.
Thus, HTML text animation has not been contemplated as a useful and viable tool, until the present application, which contemplates the automation of the process, making it not only user-friendly but also automated such that a user does not need to manually wrap the text into elements. And while HTML text animation is not as dynamic and multi-faceted as animated text created from motion design software, for the purposes of a clean and easy interface that allows a user to quickly and easily manipulate static text into animated text, the present application provides the novel solution based on a simple and powerful tool for animating text, and outputting it for consumption on digital displays.
Therefore, it has not yet been contemplated to automatically animate text at the HTML level, until the present application, which helps with reading long passages of text using a real-time playback display method, device, and software that converts static text to animated text that is shown in a way that facilitates and enhances a natural reading experience, and allows for authors or writers of text to better communicate and evoke emotion in readers.